Applewood Inn, now a B&B offering green lodging, is an eco-friendly structure built in 1979 as a private home, which continued as such until Linda and Chris Best bought it in July of 1996. The structure is a three-story passive solar home design by Lee Merrill, a Lexington architect who has designed a number of solar homes in the area. The envelope design works extremely well, but it was very expensive to build. Thus, there are relatively few such homes in existence.

The design allows for air convection all the way around the house, from the south-facing, two-story enclosed porches upward through the "envelope" into the attic space and then down the "envelope" on the north side to the crawl space underneath. The enclosed porches on the second floor are essentially usable year round, except during prolonged cloudy cold weather, with daytime temperatures on a sunny January day reaching into the 80s. Auxiliary gas heat and central air conditioning are used to balance the natural fluctuations.